Shadow Dance

by A. E. Pennymaker

  Then, like a coward, I stepped into the parlor so I wouldn't have to see the woman's drug-dazed eyes as I pulled on her shoes.

  A few minutes later, Arramy and I set off, heading south and west. I used the last of the coin in my reticule to buy a wedge of cheese and half a loaf of hard bread at a street cart, and we ate it while we walked.

  We avoided a blockade by sneaking through the back yards of a row of rundown workhouses and kept out of sight by using alleys and side streets, always working our way closer and closer to the city wall.

  Hundreds of people might have been looking for us, but Nim K was large, and it sat at the mouth of the over-lush Ulba river delta. For all the new-fangled things the city was known for, nothing could keep the frontier forest at bay. It crowded up around the edges of everything, eager to reclaim any ground that was not routinely cleared. All we had to do was find a place where the boundary between civilization and wilderness had been allowed to thin, and we were gone, slinking into the trees like shadows.

  12. A Well-read Barbarian

  27th of Nima, Continued

  I swatted at a thick black insect on my left arm, then pinched my lips into a grim pucker of disgust when a bloody smear appeared on the sleeve of my blouse. I felt the telltale sting-and-yank of another bloodsucker biting my shoulder and swiped my hand at it, only to follow that by clapping my palm quickly to my neck to squash a third one.

  "We need to make camp."

  For two hours I had followed Arramy up wooded hills and down brambled gullies, putting as much wild ground between us and Nimkoruguithu as possible. Two hours spent lurching and stumbling through underbrush and tripping over rocks while the shadows lengthened, and my blisters broke and reformed in my stolen boots.

  Two hours without a single word between us, and I didn't even glance up when his deep brogue finally broke the silence. I just put one foot in front of the other and slapped at my right temple to kill another blood-sucking insect. I didn't have enough energy to think beyond those two things, and it took much too long for his voice to register in my brain.

  "There's water on the other side of that rise," he was saying. "A river or a creek, maybe. We can find a spot to make a fire and bed down for the night."

  I brought my head up and looked at him, realization dawning. We weren't going to reach the plantation before dark. That was what he was saying. We were going to have to sleep in the woods. My foot caught a tree root and I stumbled, hissing in a breath as my toes crammed themselves into the point of the half-boot and pain shot up my shin.

  Ahead of me, Arramy came to a stop. "Need a rest?"

  I ground my teeth and shook my head.

  Arramy didn't say anything more. He waited for me to catch up with him, then turned and started off again, limping toward the rise he had just mentioned.

  Glad he couldn't see the tears brimming between my lashes, I kept moving my burning feet and my aching legs. One more hill. Climb one more hill. Then you can stop.

  ~~~

  An hour later, I dropped another armful of sticks on the pile Arramy had started and turned to find him on his knees beside a freshly dug pit in the sand.

  He had a piece of driftwood on the ground in front of him.

  It was a bit like spying on some sort of barbarian ritual; he rubbed a bunch of dead leaves into a wad, then he picked up a smooth, slender stick, skewered the wad on one end of the stick, put that end of the stick in a dip in the piece of driftwood, and began rolling the stick between his hands, spinning it fast enough that the wad became a blur.

  I let out a little laugh as smoke began rising from the driftwood. Arramy kept spinning the stick as he bent over and blew on the wad a few times, and a bright flame popped up as if by magic. Quickly, he began feeding the flame small twigs and bits of grass, then, when those were burning, he added bigger twigs, then branches, and then he had a pleasant little campfire going.

  "Won't they see the smoke?"

  He glanced at me, then quirked an eyebrow and got to his feet. "Maybe. If they're looking for it out here. We're a mile beyond the range of the Nim K long glasses, there's a big hill behind us, there's going to be fog tonight..." He dusted off his hands and looked up at the high-piled clouds scudding across the sky. "And I'm hoping they think we're sane and took the road."

  With that, he turned and began walking along the river, head down, examining the stones in the sand. Mystified, I watched as he chose several flat black rocks, then began throwing them against a boulder until they broke. He fished through the shards, picked out a good-sized piece, ran his thumb over the edge, then went limping up the bank and into the trees without another word.

  I took a breath and looked around.

  The river curved into a small, quiet eddy overhung by arching tree branches. The sand was quite smooth along the top of the bank, only dotted here and there with tufts of grass that gave way to stones, then boulders closer to the waterline.

  I may not have been able to make fire out of nothing but things that burn, but I wasn't a complete loss. I spotted waterchokes growing in the shallows, tied my skirts out of the way and rolled up my sleeves. It took a bit of work, but I managed to yank up two big ones. I had stripped off the leaves and was cleaning the bulbs in the water when Arramy came striding back down the hill onto our little 'beach,' dragging a small tree behind him.

  He proceeded to use that shard of river rock to hack all the branches off the sapling, leaving three of the stubs a bit long. He sharpened those to points, then waded out into the deeper water in the middle of the river.

  I squinted at him. For a man who loved the sea so much, he seemed right at home in the forest.

  Several minutes later there was a splash. Arramy stabbed the sapling into the water like a spear and brought it back up with a surprisingly large fish caught on the prongs. He tossed the fish up on shore and went back in, spear aloft, apparently not done catching supper.

  I skewered my waterchokes on one of the sapling branches and set them over the fire, then finally... gratefully... sank down beside the firepit and took my weight off my feet.

  It was all of a minute before I could do anything other than sit there, dumbly appreciating the sensation of not walking.

  After a moment I checked to make sure the binder and the notebook were still tied to my waist. They were. The weight of them had never moved from my thigh, but I ran my fingers along their edges through my skirt anyway, reassuring myself that they were real. Then, gingerly, I unlaced the wastrel woman's shoes and eased them off.

  Nothing was broken, but my heel bones felt like they were coming through my skin, and there were angry, open blisters where I had stepped in hot tar. The worst were the ones that had been torn, then remade where the shoes rubbed. Those were bleeding.

  I was dabbing at my raw toes with a bit of pennyroyal weed I had found among the boulders when Arramy came back with three decent-sized fish, which he proceeded to gut, then spit on a sharpened branch, all without paying me an ounce of attention.

  He finished and came tromping up the rocks to the firepit. He took in the roasting water-chokes and grunted, then propped the fish over the fire and eased himself down onto his rump in the sand next to me. "So where did you learn about plants?"

  I glanced at him. It had been four hours since we had left the wastrel house, and I still had to squash an annoying flutter in my middle when his eyes met mine. "My aunt," I murmured, focusing again on my feet.

  "Ah. Would this be the same aunt who conquered the Ogre king?" Arramy asked slowly.

  "What? No." I frowned and brought my head up. "Wait. That's how you knew I was lying?"

  He leaned forward, using his makeshift spear to stir the fire.

  I eyed him askance, biting my lip, trying and failing to hide a sneaky smirk. "You..." I lifted a brow, "Have read Ladesky's novellas."

  Arramy went still.

  "Hah! You have!" I couldn't help it. I started laughing. "How many?" I stopped laughing abruptly and drew in a dramatic breat
h. "Do your men know?"

  He heaved a long-suffering sigh, his mouth curving in at the corners. "When you get older, you'll learn that you don't have to jump into a sewer to know it stinks."

  "That's not a no," I pointed out, grinning like a fiend.

  His lips twitched slightly, hinting at a pair of dimples.

  My grin faded, and I swallowed, suddenly wondering what a real smile would look like on him. Which was dangerous territory. I went back to examining my feet.

  "So... is there really an aunt?" Arramy asked.

  I hesitated, old suspicions digging in, but if he was Coventry he was doing a fine job of not acting like it. Besides. The Coventry undoubtedly knew everything there was to know about my tiny family tree. So I nodded. "My father's sister, Sapphine Warring." I picked a blotch of tar off my right instep and winced as it took a layer of skin with it. "And it wasn't entirely a lie. She's a bit of a Rosephyrra Daguerre, really. She's independently wealthy thanks to my grandfather, and she travels all over... But she doesn't conquer things. She studies them."

  Pressing the fleshy end of a broken pennyroyal leaf to the new open sore I had made on my foot, I went on. "We were going to spend this summer in Al-Ipan. A professor friend of hers from the University of Arritagne organized a search for Ipanyr artifacts on Mount Barik-ai-Oulu... She thought I would enjoy the experience."

  I stared absently into the fire, seeing a long ago afternoon in our front parlor, Aunt Sapphine sitting on the long couch, that sly, 'I-know-something-you-don't-know' smile on her lips as she sipped her tea and watched me open the letter of acceptance from the University's Department of Research.

  She had been right. I had wanted to visit quaint Ipanese mountain villages where the people spoke an unrecorded language, and all the girls wore hand-embroidered dresses made of brightly dyed tiktik wool, and feathers and beads woven into their braids. It had seemed so important at the time. I was supposed to live in the village near the research base and learn that unrecorded language so I could help the expedition team understand the locals. I would have been the first woman ever to have codified a brand-new, never-before-written language.

  Now that dream glittered behind me like a mirage, empty and surreal. My life had veered so wildly away from it that I could barely remember details that once occupied all my time. The route we were to follow, all the research on Ipanese culture I had done, the arrangements I had to make with the Travel Bureau. All of it had been lost in the fire, and now none of it mattered. I couldn't go back. The Coventry knew about my father. They undoubtedly knew about Aunt Sapphine, and if they hadn't found her yet, having me turn up on her doorstep would be the last thing she needed. Unearthing the history of a forgotten mountain tribe seemed ridiculous when I didn't even know if I could ever go home at all. I wasn't even sure I had a home to go home to. Where would home be without Father?

  I inhaled quickly, dragging myself back to the present, my throat aching.

  Arramy was gazing into the fire, his expression unreadable.

  I finished rubbing pennyroyal on my blisters and shifted my legs out straight, loathe to put those borrowed shoes back on. The fresh air felt good.

  It was turning out to be quite a pleasant evening after all the oppressive heat of the day. The smoke from the fire was keeping the biting insects away, the river flowed by in an eddy of rich jade, the golden sawgrass on the far bank rippled and rustled in a balmy breeze, a fiery pink sun was sinking into its vibrant purple bed beyond the mountain range in the distance, and an almost peaceful stillness had snuck up between us, lulling the forest into forgetting we were there. A trio of birds were calling their evening songs to each other in the branches high above us, a sweet, silvery trill that echoed from the other side of the river. Frogs had begun chirring in the weeds along the bank.

  Before I could stop them, my thoughts turned to a bowlegged figure running down a shadowed alley. "So!" I burst out, my voice fracturing the silence. "Are the fish ready?"

  Arramy sat forward and tested the smallest fish with quick fingers. He shook his head and returned the skewer to the fire. "We'll get a three-day belly-ache and a gutful of blackworms if we eat them now."

  I wasn't entirely sure I cared. The scent of them was making my hunger pangs worse, and after running all day on nothing but breakfast and a bit of cheese, my stomach had lost the few standards it had left. I had spent a week eating Starre and Sons survival biscuits. Not much could be worse.

  Arramy lay back, easing carefully onto his right side, and his muffled hiss of pain had me looking at him. He was sallow beneath his tan, his jaw tight. He had stopped leaning on me after we left the wastrel's inn, and I had been grateful for it, but all the walking was obviously taking a toll.

  I gnawed my lower lip. Someone should probably check those bandages.

  He glanced up as I scooted around to sit directly in front of him. For some reason, my tongue wouldn't form words with him looking at me, so I just brought my hands up in a silent offer. He didn't move, and I began unbuckling the top strap of his vest, ignoring the thunder of my pulse when he lay there and let me do it, regarding me quietly while I peeled his vest away from his skin.

  Neither of the bandages had shifted, thankfully, and the wound in his shoulder had stopped bleeding. The pad below his ribs was soaked through, though, and still wet. I sat back and tore another ruffle off my petticoat, folded it up, and placed it over the soaked bandage. I refastened his vest, then turned to put my feet to the fire, pretending not to notice his gaze on my face.

  After several long minutes, Arramy checked the fish. This time he took two of them, handed me one, and started pulling the skin off the other. Then, like a good barbarian, he sucked the flaky fish meat right off the skeleton.

  It looked easy enough. I tossed my manners, stripped the skin off my fish, held the skewer two-fisted, and took a bite. Then I let out a groan and devoured the rest of it, relishing every juicy scrap.

  I heard a soft snort from Arramy's direction when I finished and tried to be ladylike about wiping my mouth with a flounce of my skirt, but I didn't bother looking at him. I went after the water-chokes instead.

  They were soft and squishy on the inside, and we had to settle for scooping the pulp out of the tough skins with our fingers, but they tasted pleasantly of lemon and honey, just like the survivalist's guide had said they would.

  Arramy got up and threw the fish bones into the river, wrapped the third fish in several large leaves, then stoked the fire, adding a few more branches – green ones, this time, that sent up curls of awful smelling white smoke. Then he came back, stretched out beside me, pillowed his head on his right arm, and closed his eyes.

  Quiet descended.

  I blinked at him. Was I supposed to keep watch?

  "Get some sleep," Arramy muttered, eyes still closed.

  "Are you sure?" I whispered. "What if a wildcat comes – "

  "They don't like gallsmoke."

  Silence.

  "What if... what if the fire goes out? Shouldn't someone make sure it — "

  Arramy opened his eyes and gave me a weary glare. "I'm not gonna let it go out. Sleep while you can. I'll wake you when it's your turn."

  I bit my lip. Slowly, I slid down to lie on my back next to him.

  His lashes lowered again.

  The sunset began fading, overtaken by a sky full of billowing clouds. A slender mist began rising from the water, and the world shrank to our little circle of firelight.

  I analyzed the branches above us for a while, counting the stars I could see through the leaves, fighting the exhaustion that coiled through my body. I didn't win. I tried telling myself that both of us couldn't just fall asleep in the middle of the wilderness, but my eyelids kept drifting shut anyway. In spite of all the things we had been through, I felt safe for the first time in months. That was my last thought before I floated into a thick, wonderfully peaceful oblivion: I was finally safe.

  ~~~

  True to his promise, Arramy woke me
sometime during the middle of the night, jiggling my shoulder.

  "Your turn, kid," he rasped as he lay down, stretching out next to me. "I just added some more wood. Should hold you till dawn."

  He must have gotten up at some point, but I hadn't even been aware he was moving. With a sigh I pushed myself into a sitting position and peered into the darkness beyond the light of the fire.

  Beside me, Arramy's breathing deepened.

  The night air was crisp and chilly, and I huddled a little closer to the fire pit, rubbing my hands up and down my arms.

  ~~~

  Arramy's rough shout had me sitting bolt upright, my heart hammering in my ribs as I came all the way awake to the sound of swearing and a series of high-pitched animal yelps coming from the top of the riverbank.

  Then it was just Arramy muttering a single curse word.

  He reappeared, limping heavily, jaw tight, lips pressed into a terse line. He saw me sitting there, and raised an eyebrow, his gaze flicking from me to the cold fire pit. He shook his head and came all the way down the bank, crossing our little campsite to where he had stashed our extra fish. He dug beneath the boulder, then held up an empty, tattered leaf.

  I closed my eyes, realizing what must have happened.

  I had fallen asleep.

  The fire had gone out.

  Our breakfast was gone.

  And I had disappointed the captain.

  13. Keep Walking

  28th of Nima

  "I'm sorry," I whispered, staring at the coals in the fire pit. They weren't even smoking anymore.

  Arramy's jaw tightened. Then he dropped the leaves that the extra fish had been wrapped in and got to his feet. "We'll just have to hope we find forage. Come on. The sun's already cleared the horizon."

  I glanced around. The fog was still lying thick and pale among the trees and over the river, heavy enough that it blotted out nearly everything beyond a few meters. How he could tell where the sun was, I couldn't guess, but it certainly was light enough to be morning. Yet another stroke to add to my tally of failures for the day. Not only would we have to travel hungry, we had already lost valuable time – time we might have had to spear another fish and make another fire.